Are you a computer science student? Need practice coding? Want to learn something new? Here are some recommendations:
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Codecademy Learn to program. It will help you become functional in a language (currently relatively limited languages) but there are a lot of gaps in what it teaches. Really mainly for beginners, though they do have some relatively good web development guides, API projects, and website projects.
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Codeschool Pretty much same as above ^^
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Lynda All Cornell students have access to lynda.com’s multitude of online video courses with their netID login. There are videos in a broad range of topics that cater to beginner and experienced programmers alike. Very high quality explanations, and good pacing.
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Python Challenge Get better at Python and/or learn Python.
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Open Source Projects Get involved with open source projects. This doesn’t have to be through Google’s Summer of Code and can be as much works as you want it to be. If you work on companies’s open source projects, they’ll be a lot more likely to hire you as you’ve already helped them a lot and they’ve seen your code before.
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iOS Tutorials Learn to program with Objective-C and create iOS apps. Tutorials go from beginner level to advanced level (and not much in between), from a basic app to using OpenGL for a 3D app. They are a few tutorials on non-iOS things as well.
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Udemy Learn programming languages and frontend development. Udemy features great courses on iOS and Andriod development as well as recap lessons on data structures and algorithms. Suitable for beginners and for coding interview preps.
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Cornell Startups Work for some Cornell startups during the semester or over the summer, there are tons of them (you’d be surprised), and you’ll get some really valuable experience in both the career and academic world. Great entrepreneurship and programming experience (maybe you’ll want to create your own startup!). Experience necessary can vary highly between companies.
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Rails Tutorial Build Twitter from the ground up with Ruby on Rails; can take anywhere from a weekend to a month, pending your skill level and commitment. This will get you some serious skill and I would encourage you to put it on your resume if you complete it.
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Project Euler Solve interesting problems. The first few are relatively simple and can be solved even without a computer but they quickly become more difficult (and interesting).
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RTFM Seriously.